At the end of his first year at Mexborough Grammar School, Ted Hughes was placed fifth in his class. His strength in English Composition was recognised, but he was ‘weak at Physics’. 1 Was there a structural or subliminal expectation in the Grammar Schools of the time that an eventual specialisation in English must be accompanied by an intrinsic ‘weakness in Physics’? In a consideration of the trajectory of Hughes’s engagement with science—with the Natural Sciences of the physical world—viewed from the perspective of what is now called ‘the Environmental Humanities’, these are questions that lead towards the debate about educational and social post-war divisions that is known as ‘The Two Cultures’, as characterised by C. P. Snow. At the end of that first year, Hughes was also ‘mediocre in Maths’ and this continued to be his worst subject each year until his fifth year report recorded that his excelling in English Composition was accompanied by an almost predictable assessment that his weakest subjects were Maths and Science. 2 It is perhaps no surprise that Mexborough Grammar School student records examined by Steve Ely note that on 8 June 1944, Hughes was placed in Imposition (Friday detention) for ‘reading in a Maths class’. 3 Expected or not, there could not be a clearer indication of Hughes’s attitude towards the more quantitative aspects of the curriculum. With his educationally ambitious family, and encouraged by the example in the same school of his older sister Olwyn’s academic success in moving from Sixth Form to university, Hughes would have been looking forward to a specialism in English within an Arts Sixth Form with the knowledge that he would be dropping the study of Science. Indeed, this separation was formalised by the designations of Arts Sixth and Science Sixth at Mexborough Grammar School. 4 This educational career was almost determined by Hughes’s first report at secondary school. In no other comparable country, observes Stefan Collini, have ‘both the final stages of school education and all of undergraduate education been more specialised’. 5
The debate about the separation of science education dates back to around the time of the establishment of English as a discipline. In an 1880 public lecture, the biologist T. H. Huxley ‘denounced the resistance to the claims of scientific education by the defenders of the traditional classical curriculum’. 6 The reply came from his target, Matthew Arnold, who argued that ‘literature’ should actually include scientific classics like The Origin of Species in addition to the Classics that were essential reading for any fully educated person. Arnold’s argument could be thought of as an early form of environmental humanities, in that the discourse of evolution might be viewed in relation to ancient European literary modes such as pastoral. But by the period of Hughes’s education, the discourses of the Sciences had become so specialised, and the Arts subjects so alienated from them, that C. P. Snow’s famous phrase struck a cultural chord. ‘The Two Cultures’, first published in essay form in the New Statesman in 1956, was the 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University and was published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. 7 The dichotomy it described will have pertained during Hughes’s time studying English at Pembroke College Cambridge, which he left in 1954. Snow’s characterisation of the gulf between ‘literary intellectuals’ and ‘physical scientists’ to the detriment of the latter was effectively only endorsed by F. R. Leavis’s combative reply to Snow in 1962. 8 Hughes, like his later critic and supporter, Keith Sagar, attended Leavis’s lectures at Cambridge. This is not the place to elaborate upon the much over-simplified and misrepresented arguments on either side of this debate, but it is significant to note that, although in defending the humanity of literary study, Leavis attacked Snow personally as a novelist—‘as a novelist he doesn’t exist’ 9 —he did later clarify that ‘My concern for “English literature” implies no slighting of the sciences’. 10 The most striking legacy of this debate for the later development of the environmental humanities is that the defender of scientific materialism, Snow, was actually also a novelist and that Leavis’s critique of social and scientific materialism in favour of the human values and enrichment of life available in the best literature also recognised the value of the sciences as creative explorations. Even if Snow’s analysis was true for education and for the post-war culture at large, there were individuals who were able to respect both sides of the division and, indeed, both Snow and Leavis were, to a certain degree, among them. In the latter part of his life, Ted Hughes could also be counted among them as a poet who took inspiration partly from his reading of scientific papers and from New Scientist and Scientific American. Indeed, as Poet Laureate Hughes made a case for including New Scientist in his expenses as ‘relevant to my job’ and essential for ‘the business of writing poems’. 11
But in the same year as the publication of Crow, Hughes made an attack on what he called ‘the scientific style of mind’ that he felt had come to dominate the education system in terms that sound very similar to Snow’s Two Cultures:
Our school syllabus of course is the outcome of three hundred years of rational enlightenment, which had begun by questioning superstitions and ended by prohibiting imagination itself as a reliable mental faculty, branding it more or less criminal in a scientific society, reducing the Bible to a bundle of old woman’s tales, finally murdering God. And what this has ended up in is a completely passive attitude of apathy in face of material facts. The scientific attitude, which is the crystallisation of the rational attitude, has to be passive in face of the facts if it is to record facts accurately […] It is taught in schools as an ideal. The result is something resembling mental paralysis. 12
In the later Winter Pollen version of this essay, Hughes calls this ‘scientific objectivity’ (WP 146) as he makes the case for the subjective inner life of the imagination as a space for making ethical and psychological explorations of ‘material facts’. Obviously drawing upon his own education, in a polemic that argues for the place of myth and storytelling in education, Hughes suggests that this mode of ‘the scientific attitude’ is not only dangerously incomplete, but untested by a moral imagination. It might appear that Hughes was, at this stage of his work, anti-science, but that would be an over-simplification. ‘I’m uneasy with the labelling Ted’s work “anti-science”, ever’, writes his close university friend Daniel Huws. 13 What is clear, however, is that Hughes’s education took place within a culture that not only separated out certain forms of knowledge, but made it structurally difficult for a poet to maintain an interest in science. This also worked in reverse. Hughes’s friend Peter Redgrove became a celebrated poet in his final year and failed his degree in Natural Sciences, although he maintained a lifelong interest in science. 14 Hughes’s friendship group also included the medical student Than Minton, so it can be argued that student friendships overcame structural separations.
In fact, Hughes’s work eventually came to be a significant subject for the relatively recent multidisciplinary study of environmental humanities in which a wide range of humanities disciplines are informed by environmental science to produce the focus of new studies such as environmental ethics, environmental history, psychogeography and ecopoetry. Like Ted Hughes, the environmental humanities regard the environmental crisis as a cultural crisis in the sense that culture includes both the arts and the sciences. Ursula Heise, in her Introduction to The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), puts it thus:
The environmental humanities […] envision ecological crises fundamentally as questions of socioeconomic inequality, cultural difference and divergent histories, values and ethical frameworks. Scientific understanding and technological problem solving, essential though they are, themselves are shaped by such frameworks and stand to gain by situating themselves in this historical and sociocultural landscape. 15
Greg Garrard, in his contribution to this Companion, offers, as a definition of the work of environmental humanities, ‘the chiasmus “ecologizing humanity/humanizing ecology”’. Garrard regards these two projects as moving towards the same aim: ‘these distinct projects—which are deliberately framed in dynamic, transitive terms—actually coalesce as we approach the most radical implications of the environmental humanities’. 16 One way of characterising the trajectory of Hughes’s work, this chapter will argue, is to see it reversing Garrard’s chiasmus by shifting from ‘humanizing ecology’ to ‘ecologizing humanity’. Underlying this trajectory is the story of Hughes’s engagement with different constructions of science from empirical science to objectivist science, to ecological science, to what he called the ‘hired science’ of vested interests, to a holistic sense of science as essential research for his poetry.
In a recent essay in Ted Hughes in Context, I outlined what I argued to be the six stages of the ‘greening’ of the writer. I was at pains to emphasise that ‘of course, these stages are not as sharply defined as the sequencing of them here might suggest, often having their gestation in earlier manifestations’. 17 These six stages were described under the headings of ‘Walking the fields’, ‘Capturing rather than shooting animals’, ‘America and after’, ‘Your Environment’, ‘Hunting and conservation’ and ‘Your World’. Running behind and through this succession of changes in Hughes’s notions of nature is a shift in his attitudes towards different forms of scientific knowledge and practices that is evident in his published poetry, essays and letters, but also in unpublished material in his archives at Emory University in the USA and at the British Library in London. That brief essay simply outlined the stages in the enlargement of the notions of nature that constituted the greening of the poet. What is attempted here is a contextualisation of those shifts from the perspective of the environmental humanities and the writer’s changing conceptions of scientific knowledge, practices and their implications.
In that essay, Hughes’s earliest conception of nature, as described in his 1963 memoir ‘The Rock’, represented the psychogeography of the small boy’s mood changes in walking up the fields opposite his front door in Mytholmroyd. 18 The term ‘psychogeogr...